Back in autumn last year Elon Musk unveiled plans for his Hyperloop project. The project would see trains transported in an airless tunnel at significantly faster speeds than existing high-speed trains.

The interesting part is that the project would rely heavily on the crowd. They announced at the time that the crowdfunding site JumpStartFund will attempt to finance the project (all $7.5 billion of it!). Central to this was the creation of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a new company led by Dr. Marco Villa and Dr. Patricia Galloway to manage the project.

The project is being divided up into smaller, and hopefully more manageable, chunks, that are then opened up to the crowd to help solve. It’s quite possibly the single most ambitious crowdsourced project to date. Below is a clip from a recent TEDx event where Dr Villa talks about the project in a bit more detail.

Hopefully it will be a light, yet inspirational, way to kick off the new year.